Missing Mom

I made manicotti recently.  It was a big step for me, because it’s something Mom used to make. I didn’t use her recipe though.  I still haven’t been able to bring myself to open her recipe box. I sort of know what’s in there—note cards that she painstakingly filled out with all her old standbys—spaghetti sauce, enchilada casserole, lemonade cookies, but also photocopies of jokes she loved, and scraps of paper that she had taped up into the cupboard at the house on Diamond—the Mayo Clinic diet, the Lord’s Prayer, a recipe for homemade pizza.   I’m not ready to open the box though and see her handwriting and be flooded with memories that I have forgotten that I have.  So I made manicotti from the recipe on the back of the pasta box.  It wasn’t bad, but the mere act of making a shadow of a food that my mother made has brought a flood of memories anyway.

Mom grew up on the shores of Northern Ireland.  Her father was a fisherman and she talked about the stuff she grew up eating—whelks, limpets, mussels, beef only on Sundays.  She wouldn’t touch seafood.  To her lobster and crab were cockroaches of the sea.  She came to America and my aunts taught her how to make the foods my dad loved—green chili, homemade tortillas, posole.  She became kind of an expert in international cooking.  She specialized in making foods we liked in restaurants. She bought a Chinese cookbook after a Sunday dinner at the Golden Dragon in Pueblo and practiced sweet and sour sauce, egg foo young, fried rice, and egg rolls.  She used the vegetables from Dad’s garden.  Honestly, Mom’s fried rice was better than any I’ve had in any restaurant and I’ve been in Chinatown in San Fransisco, New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.  All I have do is close my eyes and I can see her cracking an egg into the pan with fresh spring onions.  She would add broccoli for Darian.  Baby shrimp for me.

Kevin and I were always Italian food fanatics.  She’d make giant pans of lasagna, spaghetti with Italian sausage in the sauce, manicotti with cheese bubbling out of the edges of the shell, and homemade pizza with dozes of varieties of toppings.  She always made her own sauces with tomatoes  and peppers she canned herself from dad’s garden.  She’d make her own pasta, mixing the ingredients in a giant yellow bowl.  It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I remember our house  on Diamond with a tiny kitchen and the washing machine jammed into the corner across from the built in oven.  I’d perch on the washer and watch the clock tick around, waiting for the pizza to be done.  Olives and sausage and green peppers and onions.  That’s back before delivery and the frozen stuff.  Pizza was a treat, not a commodity.  And my mother’s is still the very best I’ve had.  And her ravioli.  She’d make a big production out of rolling out the pasta and hand stuffing every single ravioli and she’d roll her eyes and sigh when I asked for it.  But she made it for me on my birthday, or sometimes for something special—like when Darian was born, or when my novel came out, or if I’d had a particularly hard week at work.  She also made it when I finally broke up with Rick.  God, she hated him.  And she didn’t hate anyone.  Probably should have been a clue for me.

Comfort food was another of her specialities.  I remember when I came home to my apartment in Northglenn after Shayne was born and I was alone with a newborn baby for the very first time.  From nowhere, tears poured down my cheeks. It was probably a combination of hormones and having the responsibility of having a kid all by myself hitting me, but I was a wreck.  Mom drove up, took one look at me and made me a grilled cheese sandwich with cheese oozing on to the plate and fresh raspberries that she’d picked out in the backyard, and sliced avocados and glass of chilled cranberry juice. For whatever reason, that became my “rescue” meal.  She’d make it if I was getting over a cold, or when Shayne left to college and hadn’t called in weeks, or sometimes she’d stop by my classroom with a hot grilled cheese wrapped in tinfoil.  It’s a sandwich I never make for myself. And  I hadn’t had one since she died until I was going through radiation. Darian made me one and brought it to me in bed.  It had the same oozy cheese and perfect golden color.    It was like Mom was there, saying, “You’ve got this.  It’ll be okay.”

The kids and I never really talk about the night my parents were killed.  Or the aftermath of what has happened since.  But we do talk about mom’s food.  Shayne remembers her lasagna and the way she’d make just him biscuits and gravy while everybody else was eating toast.  Darian talks about the mashed potatoes that were always the perfect texture. The kids grew up in my mother’s kitchen as I did and have their own memories and favorites, but for all of us—the meals were my mother’s love.

The days after my parents death are a fog for me.  I have a couple of memories of their things as the house was being dismantled.  My mother’s jewelry spread across the bed.  My dad’s fishing poles lined up against the house.  I remember taking the yellow mixing bowl off the counter, tipping in the recipe box and grabbing my dad’s tackle box and going out to my car.  Tears made it impossible to drive and I had to stop two houses away and get it together so I could get home and do whatever came next.

The yellow bowl is in my cupboard. It’s the bowl Kevin and I ate popcorn out of on Sunday nights when we watched the Wild Kingdom and the Disney movie.  It’s the bowl my mom mixed pancakes and pie crust in.  At Thanksgiving it would be filled with potato salad.  At the Fourth of July, macaroni salad.  On any given day, the yellow bowl would hold, hot from the pan, buñuelos.   I can’t bring myself to use the yellow bowl.  But when I open that cupboard door and see it, it comforts me.  One day, when I am strong enough, I will take it out.  I will open up the recipe box and find the manicotti card or the lemonade cookie card and and mix up a batch for the kids and James.  After all, that is what Mom would want me to do.